Writer Profile

Books & Essays

Description: Confluence is about Merrymeeting Bay, in Maine. There are said to be only four places in the world where two major rivers?with entirely separate watersheds?converge at their mouths to form a common delta. Three are famous, having loomed large in the histories and economies of their regions: the Sacramento?San Joaquin delta in California, Tigris?Euphrates delta in Iraq, and the Ganges?Brahmaputra delta in Bangladesh. The fourth is Merrymeeting Bay in Maine. It is unfamiliar to most people, even within its immediate vicinity.
Frank Burroughs has lived and knocked around on Merrymeeting Bay for three decades, gaining a familiarity with its natural and human history?with its birds, fish, and mammals, and with the local people who know it best. His wonderfully fluid essays explore the ecology, environment, and activities in this unusual bay, as Heather Perry's beautiful photographs show us the details.

Book Review #1:"Franklin Burroughs -- my nominee for Maine's Essayist Laureate -- and photographer Heather Perry have combined their considerable talents to show us in word and image the rich life of Merrymeeting Bay -its frogs and sturgeon, its eels, eagles, ducks, and wild rice, its time and tides, its scenic beauty, the good people who live on it and around it. If you've never been to the Bay, this book will make you want to go there before another day has gone by." Robert Kimber, co-author of "A Place on Water" and author of "Upcountry, A Canoeist's Sketchbook", and other titles.
"The confluence of two (wonderfully) creative energies in Heather Perry and Franklin Burroughs makes this book on Maine's unique Merrymeeting Bay a journalistic treasure. Frank Burroughs' stories about the bay and its people are insightful, profound, and interesting -as well as enlarging. Heather Perry's photographs are hard won and delicious, taken over many years. No one I know has photographed the American eel as has Heather Perry." Bill Curtsiner, author/photographer of "Extreme Nature" and other books, and "National Geographic" photographer.

Description: Franklin Burroughs contributed the Foreword in memory of Jim Kilgo and the essays "Smoke and Mirrors" and "The Place of Writing in the World."

Nature writers know that to be fully human is to be engaged with our natural surroundings. Elemental South is a gathering of works by some of the region?s best nature writers?people who can coax from words the mysteries of our place in the landscape and the human relationship to wildness.

Arranged by theme according to the basic elements by which many cultures on earth interpret?earth, air, fire, water?the writings consider our actual and assumed connections in the greater scheme of functioning ecosystems. As we read of bears, ancient magnolias, swallow-tail kites, the serenity of a country childhood, the pleasure of eating real food, the remarkable provenance of ancient pottery shards, and much more, these works lure us deep into the southern landscape, away from the constructs of humanity and closer to a recognition of our inextricable ties to the earth.

The writers are all participants in the Southern Nature Project, an ongoing endeavor founded on the conviction that writing like the kind gathered here can help us to lead more human, profound, and courageous lives in terms of how we use our earth. Some of the featured writers are originally from the South, and others migrated here?but all have honed their voices on the region?s distinctive landscapes.

Book Review #1:"Provides a chorus of voices that blend
harmoniously despite their different geographies, backgrounds, and
styles. By tracing the fault lines and fractures of southern landscapes,
society, and spirit, this anthology helps the South begin to heal
stronger in the broken places."
?Will Harlan, editor of Blue Ridge Outdoors

Book Review #2:"Published 150 years after Thoreau's book, it is another Walden. I shall urge each of my grandchildren to read it." Southeastern Geographer, November 2006

Book Review #3:"This lush collection of works by members of
Southern Nature Project showcases the idiosyncratic impact of our
region?s natural surroundings on its writers, arguably a stronger
influence than the predictable Southern Gothic theme of family secrets."
?Atlanta Magazine

Book Review #4:"If you like to curl up with a good book on cold winter days and you also love the outdoors, read Elemental South. Each leads us to broader truths through careful observations of our natural surroundings."?Southern Living

Description: The Woods Stretched for Miles gathers essays about southern landscape and nature from nineteen writers with geographic or ancestral ties to the region. Franklin Burroughs chapter is entitled "Lake Waccamaw to Freelands."

From the savannas of south Florida through the hardwood uplands of Mississippi to the coastal rivers of the Carolinas and the high mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, the range in geography covered is equally broad. With insight and eloquence, these diverse talents take up similar themes: environmental restoration, the interplay between individual and community, the definition of wildness in an area transformed by human activity, and the meaning of our reactions to the natural world.

Readers will treasure the passionate and intelligent honorings of land and nature offered by this rich anthology. With the publication of The Woods Stretched for Miles, southern voices establish their abiding place in the ever-popular nature writing genre.

Book Review #1:"This is an important book?the first of its kind
exclusively on the Southeast. It should appeal to general readers who
wish to read about the genre in the Southeast, about the long and
complex relationship between American culture and nature, and also about
controversial environmental issues in the region."
?John Murray, editor of American Nature Writing

Book Review #2:"I am delighted with the very concept of this
anthology of Southern nature writing. There are dozens and dozens of
recent scholarly books on environmental literature and anthologies of
nonfiction nature writing, nature poetry, and environmental writing in
general, including a number of regionally oriented collections. But, so
far, other than Molly Westling's ecocritical studies of Southern
fiction, few of these recent publications are explicitly devoted to
Southern environmental literature. For this reason, there is a
significant void that the The Woods Stretched for Miles is intended to fill?and I think it fills the void quite well."
?Scott Slovic, author of Being in the World: An Environmental Reader for Writers

Description: In South Carolina, a croker sack is any big cloth sack. When opened, it sometimes reveals more than expected, as do these deceptively simple narratives about fishing trips, flora and fauna, and memories of the past. Observing a snapping turtle, recounting the old age and death of a hunting dog, or talking with neighbors who shot a moose and hung it in their garage, Franklin Burroughs reflects on how human and natural histories interconnect. His writing is clear and still as a pond, and his distinctive and evocative voice resonates through the details.

"The essays in my first book, Billy Watson's Croker Sack, are mostly bifocal: one eye on Maine and one on South Carolina. Critters -- turtle, moose, duck, fish, dog -- are at the center of them."

Book Review #1:Book of the Month Club, editor's choice. Reprinted by Quality paperback book club

Book Review #3:"Elegant, unexpected, remarkable for their
ability to weave through time and space and turns of emotion, these
essays would do Montaigne or Samuel Johnson proud."
?Cleveland Plain Dealer

Description: The River Home focuses entirely on the Waccamaw River, in southeastern North Carolina and northeastern South Carolina.

The American river has a rich literary heritage, extending from Twain and Thoreau to the more recent journeys of John Graves and Jonathan Raban. Following in this great tradition, Franklin Burroughs chronicles a canoe voyage through the Carolinas, visiting his ancestral homeland and the people who inhabit the banks of the Waccamaw River. His account of this distinctive and rapidly disintegrating backwater reflects on life on and off the river, topography, and how this landscape echoes in the speech, memories, and circumstances of the people he encounters. Their lives provide a kind of living archaeology, and Burroughs?s careful descriptions of their voices and habits open a door into history. As quiet and powerful as a river itself, this is a wise and beautifully written narrative of nature, people, and place by one of America?s finest writers.

Book Review #1:

"This is a jewel of a book, a well-baited hook for those who rue a world too fast a-changing."?Publishers Weekly

Book Review #3:"The River Home is a wonderful book. If
you're interested in South Carolina history in general or the human
condition in particular, this trip down the Waccamaw is a must."
?South Carolina Historical Magazine